A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

 Mulugeta Tafesse - The medicine man 1  New job, finals, and now prepping for dungeon23! Stress! Lots of stuff going on, so I've been finishing up some older writing as a relaxation thing.  These two stories are in-universe "texts" from my Kubalubalundaland setting (the name is being workshopped but it gets a little closer to being official every day) focused on the Forest Peoples. They're roughly contemporaneous - both are told during the iron-hearted years of the Many-Quilled Paramount's incessant wars. The first is taken from the long claw of the Recollection Society elder From-The-Village-Of-Wealth, a kind and curious memoryman who came of age during the Hunter Paramount's reign; the Forestophile fad at court back then was more than a fad to him. Village-Of-Wealth doesn't quite get it but he's pretty close for someone born an aristocrat. The second is a story told by Isn't-It-Obvious-To-You, a Forest Woman scholar (all the people of the Forest ...

  from A Dictionary of Sandawe: The Lexicon and Culture of a Khoesan People of Tanzania , compiled by Chris and Patricia Ehret from Eric ten Raa's field notes Really out here doing anything and everything to avoid finishing almost-done posts.  A couple of hours ago, I came across an extremely interesting entry in A Dictionary of Sandawe (shown above) while looking for another word. It was v. striking to see the mantis come up in this way, bc - as those even a little familiar with the religion of the San* peoples prob know - the mantis (and The Mantis) is really important in the worldview of Southern Africa's autochthons. There's been mentions of a special role for mantids in Sandawe thinking that I've seen before, but tbh it was just the kind of passing mention that I didn't credit with much beyond over-excited folks seeing a relationship where there might not be any; there's very little outside of these notes from ten Raa on what exactly that role was, frex.  ...

An Aka father expresses a wish for his teenage son's future, seen here cutting some wood to help set up camp ( Caterpillar Moon, 1996) I read the recent False Machine post on LBJ and taking the grey pill , which almost got me to post yet another rambling annoyingly multipart Blogger comment, until I remembered that I made this to store that kind of nonsense in the first place. Despite growing up almost literally in the shadow of the LBJ Presidential Library, which I visited frequently on school trips as a callow yoof, I'm not really equipped to deal with that aspect of the post BUT the thoughts toward the end on politicians and power interact in a cool ("cool") way with other books that have been perched in my mind for a while now. Brian Hayden's ethnographic/historical work on feasting and secret societies provides a few conclusions on the development of hierarchies of leadership that seem to converge on ideas adjacent to those Patrick came up with.  The most imp...